Press releases

19 March 2019. The Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument (PEPSI) at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona released its first image of the surface magnetic field of another star. In a paper in the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the PEPSI team presents a Zeeman- Doppler-Image of the surface of the magnetically active star II Pegasi.

6 March 2019. The 4-metre Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope 4MOST will be the largest spectroscopic survey facility of its kind in the Southern hemisphere and address today’s most pressing astronomical questions in the fields of Galactic archaeology, high-energy astrophysics, galaxy evolution and cosmology. With the publication of 13 papers, the consortium introduces 4MOST to the scientific community.

28 February 2019. On the evening of February 28, the Potsdam Conference Award was awarded for the seventh time. The IAU symposium "Rediscovering our Galaxy" hosted by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) won the award in the category "Single Events" and the special award for using innovative technologies.

20 November 2018. First quarter 2019 sees the exciting launch of ESCAPE, one out of the five successfully retained Cluster projects, which the European Commission supports with €16 million to boost the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) will develop a classification engine which automatically identifies, classifies, and provides physical properties of solar and stellar atmospheres.

24 October 2018. The large-scale digitization project APPLAUSE provides historical photographic plates from more than one hundred years of astronomical observation of numerous observatories online. The digital archive, equipped with special functions by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), not only preserves the historical inventory, but also offers the observation data of that time in a form that can be used for today's research. For example, time gaps in studies of long-term variable stars can be filled.

18 October 2018. Prof. Dr. Katja Poppenhäger, expert on planets around other Suns, was successfully appointed as the head of the stellar physics and stellar activity section at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), and as joint professor at the University of Potsdam, Germany.

8 October 2018. With the Pristine survey, an international team is looking for and researching the oldest stars in our Universe. The goal is to learn more about the young Universe right after the Big Bang. In a recent publication, the scientists have reported on the discovery of a particularly metal-poor star: a messenger from the distant past.

1 October 2018. Using the MUSE spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), scientists have uncovered vast cosmic reservoirs of atomic hydrogen surrounding distant galaxies. The international team led by Lutz Wisotzki, Professor of Observational Cosmology at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and the University of Potsdam, observed for the first time how far such luminous hydrogen clouds extend into space. The researchers now report on this in the current issue of "Nature".

13 September 2018. An international team of scientists led by Ivan Minchev of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) has found a way to recover the birth places of stars in our Galaxy. This is one of the major goals in the field of Galactic Archaeology, whose aim is to reconstruct the formation history of the Milky Way.

22 August 2018. With the Ludwig Biermann Award, the Astronomical Society is honoring Dr. Else Starkenburg from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) for her scientific work on the origin of our Milky Way and its neighbouring galaxies.

13 August 2018. NASA's Parker Solar Probe, launched on 12th August, will be the first spacecraft to approach the sun reaching 10 solar radii, and will provide science with new insights into our home star over the next few years. An international project under the auspices of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) adds ground-based measurements at the same time - enabling completely new insights into solar activity and its effects on Earth.

25 July 2018. Members of the X-ray astronomy working group at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics (AIP) and an international team have published the first catalogue of X-ray sources in multiply observed sky regions. The catalogue comprises almost 72,000 objects, partly of exotic nature, which were observed with the space-based X-ray telescope XMM-Newton. It provides information on the physical properties of the sources and enables astronomers to identify brightness variations on time scales of several years - and includes several thousand new detections.

18 July 2018. Astronomers from the Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) tested as part of an international team a new observation mode with the MUSE instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile in June 2018. The technology used for the first time suppresses the blurred effects of the atmosphere even better and produces very sharp images of planets, stars and galaxies – among others of Neptune, which was once discovered at the predecessor institute of the AIP.

6 June 2018. Kris Youakim from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) is talking this week at the 232nd AAS meeting about his latest results on the analysis of the stellar debris in the galactic halo. Our Milky Way is a relatively large galaxy, and the current accepted theories suggest that it was built up over time by the accretion of smaller, low-mass galaxies.

The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) is once again involved with offers on the Telegrafenberg at the Long Night of Sciences on June 9, 2018 from 5 to 11 pm. Visitors to the historical sites will get an exciting insight into the history, present and future of astronomy "Made in Potsdam".

23 May 2018. By targeting the most massive galaxies in our universe, astronomers have studied how their stars move. The results are surprising: while half of them spin around their short axis as expected, the other half turn around their long axis. Such kinematics are most likely the result of a special type of galaxy merger, involving already massive, similar-mass galaxies. This would imply that the growth of the most massive and the largest galaxies is governed by these rare events.

Under the motto "Research. Discover. Participate." the Potsdam Science Day will take place for the sixth time on Saturday, May 5. More than 40 universities and research institutions in the region participate - including the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP). Venue this year is the university campus in Potsdam-Golm.

25 April 2018. Derived from 22 months of observations, the much awaited second data release of the Gaia mission is now public. The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) contributed to the common effort with software modules providing first look validation and background correction for the data of the radial velocity spectrometer. Additionally AIP is one of the official Gaia Partner Data Centres that host a mirror of the complete Gaia archive.

17 January 2018. Astronomers, under the lead of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and with participation of the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP) using ESO’s MUSE instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile have discovered a star in the cluster NGC 3201 that is behaving very strangely. It appears to be orbiting an invisible black hole with about four times the mass of the Sun — the first such inactive stellar-mass black hole found in a globular cluster and the first found by directly detecting its gravitational pull. This important discovery impacts on our understanding of the formation of these star clusters, black holes, and the origins of gravitational wave events.